Annabel - Kathleen Winter [23]
The second postcard was a photograph of the Pont d’Avignon.
“This bridge was built in the eleven hundreds,” Thomasina wrote. “There’s only part of it left, but imagine it standing that long. It’s not the magpie bridge, Wayne, but wings still helped build it. Angel wings. There was a boy about your age. I forget his name but angels told him to build the bridge. He was able to lift massive stones, and he built it. There’s a famous song about this bridge — maybe you’ll learn it one day in French class.”
“What is that woman trying to put in Wayne’s head?” Treadway was covered in spruce shavings. A layer of cold, sweet air from outdoors clung to him.
“Maybe you should put those away,” Jacinta told Wayne. “Do you want a tin?” She gave him a Peek Freans shortbread tin and Wayne put Thomasina’s cards in it.
“Thomasina is liable to run out of money and get stuck in one of those places,” Treadway said. “Some people have an awfully funny way of going on.”
7
Elizaveta Kirilovna
WAYNE LOVED SYMMETRY, and so he loved grade three when his teacher taught about three-dimensional geometric shapes. One night while Jacinta was bottling rhubarb he asked her, “Have we got any of those wire things with paper on them that you close garbage bags with?”
“Twist ties?”
“You close garbage bags with them.”
Jacinta was fishing Mason jar lids out of her pot with a pair of tongs. “Look in the garbage-bag box.”
“Have we got any bread that isn’t homemade?”
“Your dad’s.” Treadway used store-bought bread for his toast every night at nine o’clock.
“I only need a couple of slices.”
“Behind the bologna.” Jacinta was waiting for the lids to pop down on two dozen jars. She liked it when the lids popped. She liked the definite, abrupt sound that meant no one in her family would get botulism. She liked the shiny jars on the counter, shoulder to shoulder. The accomplishment of it. Treadway might get lost out on the trapline. If he did, there would be jars of food. She filled and arranged the jars and washed the rhubarb pot and put away the sugar and cloves and the extra raisins. By the time she looked at Wayne he was sitting on the living room floor surrounded by decahedrons and cubes and hexagonal globes all the way from Treadway’s Reader’s Digest stack to the television set. Wayne had peeled the twist ties down to the wire. Then he had taken the bread and kneaded pieces into little balls of putty and connected the wires to each other using the putty. The shapes were fragile and powerful.
“Those are beautiful.”
“Miss told us to use toothpicks and modelling clay. But I don’t have any modelling clay. And we never have toothpicks.”
“Those are something else.” Jacinta knelt and looked at the shapes. They were from another world. The skies. “They remind me of planets. And orbits. And stars. And the lines connecting the stars to make constellations. How did you think of using twist ties and bread?”
“That’s how Gracie Watts eats her bread at lunchtime. She picks it off her sandwich. She makes gnomes and dogs. You can make anything. When she eats her carrots, she does this other great thing. Her mom gives her carrot slices. She pops the pale orange middle out so there’s only the bright orange ring left, with a hole in it.”
“What,” Treadway said when he came in from his shed and saw the celestial, symmetrical living room floor, “in the name of God?”
“It’s homework, Treadway,” Jacinta said. “Science.”
“Math, Mommy. It’s math, not science.”
“If that’s math” — Treadway picked his bread bag off the floor; it was nine now, and all that was left in the bag was a heel-end — “those teachers at that school need to have their heads examined.”
The World Aquatic Championships came on television and Wayne watched them with Jacinta. He saw synchronized swimming for the first time. The Russian team turned into a lily. The lily turned inside out and became a decahedron. The hats of the Russian swimmers had starbursts of sequins at the crown, and they were turquoise. The suits were of Arabian paisley. Wayne was transfixed.
“Mom. They’re making patterns.